Although AppleScript is probably not one of the most used features of Cartographica, it's quickly becoming one of the most powerful. Since the first release of Cartographica, we have supported using the Macintosh built-in scripting system to manipulate information in Cartographica. If you're new to AppleScript or an old hand, we think some of the improvements we've made to 1.2.2 are big news.

Here are some of the things we've done for 1.2.2:

Increased support for analysis functions

We've added support for a number of previously-unavailable analysis functions to the Cartographica AppleScript dictionary. Now you can add nearest distance, count points in polygons, and create buffers right from within a script.

Increased precision for numbers retrieved with AppleScript

Previously the numbers returned were rounded to floating point bounds, which wouldn't work as well for coordinate systems like Latitude and Longitude which have small incremental changes on large numbers. Now, we will return significantly more digits of significance in our data

Date Fields returned as short dates

Previously, date fields were returned as long dates, making them a bit difficult to deal with (think "Saturday, November 27, 2010"), now, we use the localized short date for presentation and exchange of data

Change in terminology for readability

We changed the names of some of the commands to make them more readable and AppleScripty. In most cases, you will see these changes as soon as you open your existing scripts on a Mac running 1.2.2. If you saved a script as text, you will have to make the changes manually, but most are saved in binary form which makes the transition simple... you have nothing to do but open the file.

Import commands now return a list of added layers when they complete

When using the "import vector" and "import raster" commands, you will now receive a list of newly loaded layers when the command completes (or an empty list if there were no read layers). This makes it easier to load in new data and perform operations on it.